


Self Portrait as Damaged Goods

by bisexualklausmikaelson



Category: The Originals (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 15:41:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17144516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bisexualklausmikaelson/pseuds/bisexualklausmikaelson
Summary: (Maybe love is a violence, and she simply couldn’t undo it).





	Self Portrait as Damaged Goods

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: takes place after s4, au future fic told in my usual unstructured way. and takes some of the spoilers of s5 into consideration. hope you enjoy.

― 

She searches for home everywhere she goes.

In the coldness of Parisian winters, with her glass of red wine, a warm bath bubbling in the background, a man with Elijah’s eyes and Klaus’ smirk. She fails to recognize it. Lips thin, pale pink, and annoyingly brilliant in the way they quirk up halfway, half-smiling, half-mocking―

Half-amused.

― 

“Who’s Klaus?” He asks one afternoon, as he points to her side of the table. “Your phone’s been ringing, he’s pretty persistent with trying to get a hold of you,” the man chimes in, looking at her with doubt and curiosity. (She’s unattainable though, she’s always been).

She chugs down her beer before answering. “He’s persistent alright,” she says. “What is it?” Hayley asks, with a small fire lighting up inside of her. With just another heartbeat.

“You answered me,” Klaus murmurs softly. “And only after sixty-two calls,” he adds on and she can almost hear his smirk on the other line.

She feels every fiber in her being turn as still as a statue. A body burning, torch-lighting her heart. “I thought after the sixty-first call that you’d get the idea,” she tells him instead. “That I don’t wanna talk to you,” she mumbles.

He laughs, like the whole world could crumble, and he wouldn’t blink. “What a cruel thing to say to a man,” Klaus whispers. “On his birthday,” he adds on.

“You’re old enough,” she sings,with a distant tone. “Haven’t you celebrated enough birthdays?” the she-wolf asks.

The shattering coldness she carries sounds like blood, like love long lost and forgotten. Like the day he awoke and found that this beast was fully inside the both of them and had ruined them.

Had rendered them unrecognizable to each other. He might as well say it like it is. A wolf will always be a wolf. Nothing more.

“I haven’t celebrated a single one with you,” he offers.

“Sure you have,” she responds. “Those few years, where you took Hope and I skiing, when we all took a road trip to British Columbia, when you took us to the Eiffel Tower―”

“You remember,” he interrupts, voice half-wolfish, half-astonished.

“Yeah,” she nods, slowly. 

And this is how their conversations always go, it’s always fleeting, like there’s something he’s waiting to say, but never gets around to it. They talk about Hope, about their lives, everything except―

“Goodbye Klaus,” she quickly says, before hanging up.

― 

(Maybe love is a violence, and she simply couldn’t undo it).

― 

Some nights, he just calls and says that it’s over. He’s done the whole love thing with Caroline, with Camille…that’s what he says. That’s how he got through it. There was a tunnel, a night, pain and love. It ended. Even if the sun never comes up again, even if he sleeps alone in the middle of the bed, even if he makes coffee for one.

It ended, and he did not perish.

That’s gotta mean something.

― 

“I meant,” he takes a deep breath, pauses in between because good god, what is he doing? “I wanted to celebrate my birthday with just you, no one else,” Klaus specifies.

“Are you drunk?” she giggles, like a forest, a night of dark trees.

“Perhaps,” he responds. “Are you?” Klaus questions, cocking his head to one side, fingers twirling with the phone cord.

“Maybe I am,” she shrugs, out-monstering the monster. “Maybe I’m considering your offer,” and her voice sounds a little too much for him to handle.

A little too sad, a little too overbearing. 

She sighs on the other line.

She’s never enough for anyone.

― 

Her hundredth birthday is spent near a bonfire close to a fallen tree. She makes room for her hunger, for the leopards that carry that rich blood Rebekah had told her glorious stories about. For the tigers Kol says that love a good chase.

For her to be a wolf, to revel in something that will be worthy of the rising moon, that pale light.

(It’s the only place where she doesn’t see a pair of blue eyes tracking her every move). 

― 

You know, he says over the phone. You left your heart in New Orleans, Klaus simply announces, as if he knew her mouth was burning. Like it was animal. like it was on the border of sainthood.

She falls against her bedroom wall, as if she had seen a runaway ghost train. As if her reflection was speaking back to her in shattered tongues.

“What are you talking about?” Hayley questions.

“My brother,” his mouth would destroy her with his next words. Actually, they probably destroyed her before that, the moment she mistook them for something soft. For something that is hers. “He’s there, he’s still there…at that very same spot you left him,” he reminds her.

And she feels the sea inside her as she thinks of Elijah. As she thinks of how much happier he was as the simple pianist. How much happier he was without her.

It’s all too big, between her and Klaus, and too never-ending to speak.

“I left him,” she firmly says. “Remember that,” she orders, hanging up one last time.

― 

(He’s two-thousand and fifty-two years old on the day that she appears on his doorstep). 

― 

And they drowned in violets, in art, earth…a body under another body that owed him nothing and everything and itself as it is. He moves through her, inside, tastes her bones of silver and crown. Not a thing to be owned. But a thing to be worshiped.

That’s how they make love, under the stars, under badlands, red dust. War-torn. Like wolves do.

― 

After wards, he’s wearing a smile like a pocket knife, small and ready for the kill. 

Klaus watches her as if he’s singing a song for the lonely. She turns to her side, ties her hair up, tells him that he fucks her so good and so brilliant. Makes her forget her own name, feels as though his touch haunts the margins of her memories―

“What happened to your boyfriend?” he wonders, remember hearing a voice on the other line, almost every time he called. 

She shakes her head. “He wasn’t my boyfriend,” Hayley specifies. “He wasn’t my anything really,” the she-wolf realizes. And it takes her years to figure out that that’s how she felt about almost every man, except for Klaus.

She could never put a name to what she had with Jackson, with Elijah…but Klaus was her family. More than that, he was her kin. He carried her.

“You haven’t changed, have you?” he smirks, snuggling up beside her.

“Neither have you,” she teases, placing a soft kiss on his nose. 

He feels everything when she’s close to him, as if his life is a city of ruins, and she is at the center of it. 

“Happy birthday, Klaus,” Hayley whispers into his ears.

“Thank you,” he nods, reaching over to grab a bottle of wine and two glasses lying lazily on his bedside table. “Here’s to a thousand more,” he sings, pouring wine into them.

She raises her glass, smiles politely. “Cheers,” and clink.

― 

(She’s three thousand years old one the night of their wedding).

―


End file.
